Submarine pair return home

Press, 4 December 1979, Page 9

Submarine pair return home

NZPA-Reuter Seattle A girl, aged seven, and a sailor who went to sea in a yellow submarine and were lost for three weeks are back with their families. The girl. Nicole Rowley, and the sailor, James Ringrose, aged 37, were found by a Panamanian merchant ship drifting in Mr Ringrose’s 5m submarine in the Pacific and taken to their waiting families in Seattle. Mr Ringrose said he took Nicole on a “pleasure ride” when he left Depoe Bay, Oregon, on November 10 to search for an experimental buoy which had drifted loose offshore. A wave washed over the open submarine hatch, knocked out the vessel’s electrical power supply, and the vessel drifted out to sea

and ran into a storm, Mr ! Ringrose said. ! He and Nicole lived on a ; few tins of tuna, biscuits, ;and fish they caught from their submarine, he said. (They drank moisture that ! collected inside the submarine. Nicole shared the duty of pumping water out of the submarine’s bilges. “Nicole was very brave. She was never frightened,” he said. He said she had a favour-| ite song while they were tost — the Beatles song, “We all live in a yellow submarine.” A United States Coast Guard official said the 515.000 submarine, which Mr Ringrose had made of such! items as oil drums, metal; sheets, and reinforced glass for underwater observations,; sank after Mr Ringrose and the girl were picked up. i